


trust me, i'm a doctor

by blackholenipples



Series: rest in fuckin' pieces, hiruzen my good FUCKING ASSHAT [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, I LIED WHEN I SAID I CARED ABOUT ANYONE OTHER THAN THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE, Self-Indulgent, This is all rin because, a little bit of wish-fufillment because i can, canon carachter death, fixing kishi's women by letting them do their job, just because, ridiculously short chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 16:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11040126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackholenipples/pseuds/blackholenipples
Summary: Obito dies.Rin learns to stand on her own.





	1. Rin

They teach you a lot of things before they let you call yourself a medic nin. Anatomy, chakra systems, how to break people coldly and efficiently, how to put them back together,...

Most of it is fun. Rin enjoyed almost all of her lessons during her two-year apprenticeship at KHS (Konoha Shinobi Hospital). However, there are always a few skills you hope you'll never have to use. On anyone, let alone your best friend.

She'll probably throw up once she's done, a part of her notes, while slowly feeding chakra into another capillary in Kakashi's eye socket. The work is both miniscule and infinitely delicate. Her focus is rock solid, despite the broken, gurgling gasps coming from one of the bodies at her feet and the dry sobs coming from the other. One vein left. That's all the physical connections. Kakashi's face is still pretty, despite shiny pink scar now over his left eye. The eye itself is dark. Black, for now.

She wipes her hands on her skirt. Blood smears mar the pretty white fabric in the shape of a child's hands. (She's an adult by law. She will finish her job.) Connecting Kakashi's chakra systems to the new eye is a snap. She's a little surprised that his body accepted it so easily, but he's done.

Obito will not be so easy to fix.

"Kakashi. The cave is unstable. Go." He blinks at her. One eye silvery grey, and the other spinning in a mesmerising twirl of red and black. He'll be chakra exhausted in minutes if he leaves the sharingan on, she notes. He nods, and pulls his forehead protector down to cover his eye. It stretches a little, but stays in place. He looks more like himself without Obito's eye.

"I'll meet you outside. You have thirty seconds to say goodbye." For once, he's smart enough to simply walk out. He's on the verge of collapse, and anything more strenuous would knock him out.

She turns to Obito. He's small, objectively. Huge compared to Kakashi, but still has the short fingers and full cheeks of a soldier on the wrong side of puberty. He's sightless, now. His one good eye scavenged to be used as a weapon by his soon-to-be-former teammate. Half his body is crushed under tons of rock and they have no backup within a two-day range. Even if they did, there would be no fixing this. Not unless you had a significant supply of the Shodaime Hokage's miraculously regrowing cells or access to Tsunade of the Saanin herself. Probably not even then.

His breaths are still gurgling. There's blood flooding his lungs. It will probably be that that kills him, since he's automatically slowing the blood loss with what little chakra he has left.

Rin grabs a kunai in her left hand, and presses a kiss to his bloody forehead.

"I'll see you in the peaceful lands, my friend." She stabs him in the heart. The poison coating the blade is not the most painless she carries, but it is the fastest-acting. Obito is dead before the next blink of her eyes. 

She walks out, and the cave collapses behind her.


	2. Kakashi

They left Obito behind. It’s not the first time she’s been unable to save a comrade, but it’s the first time it’s  _ hurt _ like this. 

She doesn’t think Kakashi noticed what she did. Doesn’t know if he’ll ever figure it out. She doesn’t even know if he’ll mourn. 

Obi was the best of them. He was a taijutsu prodigy, and he’d had an instinctive grasp of the sharingan. She was there when Okari had awakened his last year. He’d spent three weeks jumping at every flicker of movement in the corner of his eye and stumbling into trees because he couldn’t process properly. Obito had awakened his sharingan and used it three seconds later. That kind of thing was a legend in konoha. Only Madara himself was supposed to have ever been that good. 

More importantly. He was bright. Brilliant. Optimistic and grinning even when there was so much old blood caked on his face that his teeth glowed red with it. 

It’s not fair. 

Rin spends a week crying before she gives it up. 

She locks all of the emotions out of the way and gets on with her life. 

They have a war to fight. 

One of the elders called it a happy coincidence that team Minato had a hole that needed filling. Genma got tapped for assassination, which is always solo work. Ebisu didn’t pass the chunin exams and got transferred to another genin team who’s medic dropped out. Chouza’s out wreaking havoc and being a legend. Team Ino-Shika-Cho’s presence on the battlefield is more important to the council than a single jounin’s duties to his genin team.

They get Gai. 

Team Minato’s missing a taijutsu specialist after all.

It takes her weeks to realise she’s not the only one on the team who isn’t quite right. Who isn’t quite what they used to be. 

Kakashi shows up late for a briefing on a monday. It’s just five minutes, except it’s like fifteen because he’s religiously ten minutes early to everything. 

He does it again on wednesday

Thursday, he laughs. It’s dark and bitter and it follows a hospitalization he’d incurred by running until his legs gave out in a race around the village with Gai. After four hours of training with his dogs in the morning. 

If she were a better person, a better teammate, a better lady, she’d worry. She would be frantic, like gai. Who is simultaneously not really a part of this bleeding, broken team and the only thing holding them together. 

Saturday, she wonders where her crush on Kakashi went. 

Sunday they get a mission. 

Tuesday she gets captured. 

She stops counting the days after Thursday. 

She learns to lie. 

Rin lies every time she opens her mouth, every time they stick a needle under her skin or break a bone. 

Her torturers can’t get inside her mind. She’s a medic, she’s too disciplined for that. Instead they have to guess what’s true and what’s false information. 

Rin doesn’t know. 

She wonders if Kakashi will save her. 

She wonders if Kakashi will kill her. 


	3. Isobu

They give up on torturing her. She gives them no clues, no names, no weaknesses. Konoha will not be beaten in this war just because Kiri was lucky enough to find one of their chuunin. They turn her instead. They put a beast inside of her with a leaking seal that poisons her every breath. 

The killing chemicals taste like victory. Kiri ends up with none of the information they had hoped for and if the demon hates her, at least it will kill her quickly. 

They won’t get the bomb they intend to turn her into. 

She retreats into a corner of her mind. Once upon a time this corner housed a shrine on a hilltop with a pond of black water in the front instead of a garden. Rin would come here to meditate. 

She would have come here to die. 

Now there is no building, no peaceful woods. 

There is only a lake. Deep and black and seemingly endless. A beast rises from the water, disturbing the stillness. A flood of black water washes off of the great turtle’s shell and a single red eye looks down upon her. 

“ **You’re not like the last boy.** ” The Bijuu says.  **“You, child. They tell me you’re a healer. But you smell like death. You could have been one of mine, under the old ways.”**

Rin is aware of it. She would have been. Back when the tailed beasts had roamed free, her mother’s clan had learned all they knew of poisons from Isobu himself. There weren’t many who still believed. Not her cousin the poison specialist who still carries the name he gave them and none of the other half-clan children. But her mother told Rin all of the stories. She’d grown up on the turtle’s tales and the legends of his wisdom. The legends of his mercy, his love for children. And the tales of his wrath at those who harm them. 

She tilts her chin up and looks the only god she’s ever worshipped straight in the eyes. 

“I am.” Her voice is too high, and filled with fear. 

She stops and stands up taller. She grips the charm on her wrist, inscribed with recipes for one of her favourite toxins on each bead. Isobu looks at it, and something in his gaze shifts. 

“I am Rin Nohara, and I was baptised a dead lake by my mother on my hundredth day. I was taught to heal by my village, yes. But my bag holds both poison and medicine in equal quantities. My hands are bathed in red as often as they are in green.” A large part of her wants to cower. The rest is screaming at her to kneel and respect the god she’s loved since she was a babe. 

But Isobu is not a vengeful god, and He loves His followers. He has always let them speak. 

There’s been a best-friend shaped hole in her heart for the last two months. Rin knows it. She knows she’s been getting colder and more vicious and that she needs someone to anchor to. 

She's an assassin by blood and clan. She needs someone, something to keep her human. 

As a child, it was her faith. When she met Obito, it became her faith in his dream and her hope for the future. Maybe it can be her faith again. If not, she probably won't live long enough for it to matter anyway. 

Isobu looks at her, contemplates. She stills. Patience is the virtue of the ninja. 

Her mindscape stills with her. There is no wind to ruffle the grass she stands on and not a ripple in the lake. 

**“You understand patience and discipline, at least. And you smell like one of the Shiranui.”** Rin nods. 

**“I will not be your pet or your prisoner. Locked away silently and used for my chakra,”** he says. 

She falls to her knees. 

“You are a god. I will be your vessel, should you allow it.”

The great turtle chuckles. Low and echoing over the vastness of the water. 

**“I cannot be a god either. Not anymore. But I would have a partner and a friend again if you are willing to help me fulfill my responsibility to the world, I will help you to fulfill yours to your people.”**

Rin looks up. Isobu has crouched so that his eye is on a level with the top of her head. 

**“Rin Nohara. Will you help be to collect the poison of the world and cleanse that which can no longer be allowed to exist?”**

Rin accepts. 


	4. Danzo

Isobu insists. 

All signs point to Kumo nin.


	5. Minato

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story was initially supposed to be light and ridiculous and mostly fluffy and i will drag it back on track if it kills me.  
> (also I live for a rin that is just so competent that tired and done ninja keep offloading their responsibilities onto her without permission. it happened to kakashi in canon, so this is fair, right???)

She gets called into the Hokage’s office straight from a tricky surgery. The jounin had been hit with an unknown poison that corrupted his chakra instead of his blood. He’d needed a complete transfusion and Rin was the only person available that had both the necessary reserves and control to do it. It’d meant that she had to not only keep a resonating mimicry between Isobu’s chakra, hers, and the patient’s but she also had to filter it, because there’s no reason to replace one kind of deadly, corrosive chakra poison with another. 

She’s cranky, she’s exhausted and she just wants to be at home in bed. Or at least in front of her desk with hospital-strength coffee and the ability to make a dent in some of the paperwork backlog that had built up while she’d been on mission in Iwa. 

At least she’s got a comfy chair and some of the good tea the hokage keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk for this meeting. 

Minato looks awkward, actually. Flushed and unsure of how to speak about whatever it is on his mind. His hair’s even more of a bird’s nest than usual and his chakra is bouncing all over the place in nervousness. 

“Rin,” he starts, “help me.” 

She raises an eyebrow. 

“Kushina’s pregnant.” Rin tries to look surprised, really, she does. Minato’s face says she didn’t try hard enough. 

“You already know. Why do you already know? You’re a trauma surgeon with a subspecialty in poisons and toxins.”

Rin grins and taps the outer corner of her eye. There’s a line of three dark green triangles along the bottom edge of each one that marks her as the three-tailed jinchurikki.

“I’m attending. She’ll have a Jinchuriki on standby and between Isobu and I and Kakashi’s sharingan, we can deal if things go wrong. Rei will be heading the procedure, so no worries with the actual birthing part.” 

Rin sips her tea.

Minato lets out a breath. 

“Good. 

But there’s something else.” If he asks her what she thinks he’s about to, Minato will come to regret it with every bone in his body. Rin is a widely-feared medic who has managed to keep the sandaime hokage himself in a hospital bed for a week. She is scary. She is persuasive. She will recruit his in laws. 

Her glare obviously doesn’t communicate this well enough. 

“I want to take some time off. I need you to be the interim Hokage.” 

Rin keeps glaring. 

“Shikaku.” She says, well aware it won’t work. 

“Busy. If i take him away, Hiashi gets jounin command, which means Kakashi becomes head of anbu.”

Kakashi is a brilliant ninja and a devoted captain. His subordinates love him. He is not allowed more subordinates. He will become shadow leader of the village without even trying. 

He will do no paperwork and not make a single good decision. Rin will cry. Kakashi is not allowed responsibility or minions. 

“Inoichi.”

“Too nice.”

“Orochimaru.”

“Not good enough at pretending to be nice.”

“Tsume.”

“I need someone who will keep up with at least ten percent of the paperwork.”

“Sarutobi.”

“Too old. Also vacationing in tea country somewhere.” 

“Jiraiya.”

“No. Mikoto or Kushina will murder him. The further he stays from the village until the babies are born, the happier I will be.”

Well, fuck. 

Rin looks at her tea. This is consolation tea and it’s so not worth it. 

“I trust you. You’re strong enough that none of the other villages will see it a us being weak. And you’d get around to it sooner or later anyway.” 

Rin disagrees. She’s perfectly happy with her current job. Lots of teaching, some paperwork and lots of opportunity to scary grin at ninja who are too stupid to stay abed when they’re bleeding out.

“Rin. You’re sixteen. It took you less than a year to become a full medic-nin. Six months after you started working at the hospital you were an attending physician. It hasn’t even been three years and you’re head of the hospital. You are a brilliant administrator and you have an entire country that's terrified of you. ” 

Rin tries not to think about it. But the people above her were all so glad to hand over problem patients and paperwork. She knows for a fact that the last head of hospital is happier than he’s been in ten years now that he’s back to sewing people back together all day. 

And Kiri deserves it for not appreciating Isobu. Isobu is awesome when he's not napping instead of helping her argue with people. 

“You start in two months when Kushina hits the six month mark. If you refuse, I’ll offer it to Kakashi. And I’ll tell Gai first.”

That’s so unfair. Kakashi will go along with any plan of Gai’s even when he knows better. Kakashi knows better than to think he can be hokage, but Gai will be so happy for him. 

Kakashi is weak to happy Gai. He will give in. Rin will cry. She pouts.

“You're a useless pretty boy. You have more hair gel than brain cells and I wish your wife was Hokage instead.” She says. 

“Thank you, I woke up like this, and between us, I only got the job because my wife decided she didn't want to do any of the work she would have to do with the position. She decided she'd rather be the monster people warn their kids about and periodically go destroy armies.”

“I’m not wearing the hat unless you die.” 

Minato nods. 

“And I want to pick my replacement because Aiden won’t go back and I don’t trust you.” She says, finishing the last of her now-lukewarm tea. 

He grins. 

She leaves her empty mug on his desk. 

She hopes it stains the wood.


	6. Tsunade

Rin slides into an empty seat at the bar and orders a gin and tonic. Something is glistening on the countertop and she’s pretty sure her pants are going to stick to the stool. The place is probably violating a dozen different health code regulations.

There’s a busty blonde woman beside her drinking something that looks a hell of a lot stronger than sake straight from the bottle. She doesn’t actually look old enough to be drinking age, which means she’s either older than she looks or a kunoichi.

Rin’s intel says she’s both. And that it takes more than a few bottles to affect this particular woman.

“Tsunade Senju. Rin Nohara.” She says, sliding over an envelope with the Hokage’s seal on the front. The bartender hands her a glass and Rin gives him a smile and a bill.

The blonde opens the letter and puts it down within a few seconds. Rin doesn’t know many people that can read that quickly and all but one of them are medic nin. She drains the bottle and turns to face her.

“Minato sent you. He didn’t say what for, except that I’m to come back to the village or he will officially declare me a missing-nin. But you don’t look like the kind of girl they send out on retrieval missions.” She says, raising an eyebrow.

Rin smiles thinly.

“Usually I’m not.” she takes another sip and puts her glass down. “I’m in need of someone competent to take over as the hospital head while I play interim hokage. All of my department heads are good, but none of them can be spared or have any interest in paperwork.”

Tsunade looks unimpressed.

“You would be doing mostly admin work and training. I have people that actually enjoy being in surgery and I’m more than happy to pay you to keep the place running so they can do that.”

“Not a chance kiddo.” She retorts.

Good thing she came prepared.

“How about a wager, then. Shouji. I hear you’re one of the best in fire country. I win, you come back to Konoha.”

“And if I win?” Tsunade asks.

Rin grins. “What do you want?”

Tsunade looks her up and down. If she were a man, Rin’s pretty sure she knows what the odds would be. However, “Pay my debts. All of them.” Tsunade says with nothing more sinister than a grin.

Rin leans her elbow onto the bar, and it’s just as sticky as she’d feared. She rests her head on her hand and takes another drink, eyes not leaving Tsunade’s.

“You are thirteen and a half million ryo in debt.” She says slowly. “Those aren’t even odds. You win, I’ll pay your debts, But–”

She takes a sip, finishing her drink.

“If I win you relocate to Konoha. Permanently. Regardless of whether or not you’re working at the hospital.”

Tsunade is a chronic gambler who is so deeply in debt at this point that she simply can’t afford to say no.

They play.

Rin cheats, of course. You don’t learn to play shouji by the rules when Kushina Uzumaki teaches you. You also learn to not get caught cheating, and she doesn’t.

When she wins, Rin sends Tsunade her sweetest smile. Tsunade swallows and takes a full minute to tear her eyes away from her lips.  

She takes Tsunade to bed, because she’s beautiful and interested. They leave for Konoha in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> umm the rin who sacrificed herself for her village would never have let her bff drown in his own blood due to a crushed lung


End file.
